Contents

Subject matter

The subject of #xkcd changes very, very quickly. The topic usually has nothing to do with the conversation at hand, so pay attention. Depending on the time of day, it's not uncommon for four or more rowdy discussions to be going at once. Sometimes these discussions will form channels, but usually not.

We have a bot. His name is Bucket. Go to #bucket if you're going to edit/trigger bucket for anything longer than a couple lines. If you wish to trigger even more, do it in private message to Bucket. If you want to know more about what is or is not allowed when it comes to our buckety friend, please consult Bucket.

We are not /b/. Shut the fuck up about it.

Yes, some denizens use chan-speak. No, simply referencing memes is not humorous.

Yes, some denizens are Anonymous. No, we won't tell you who.

Yes, XKCD has 4chan/meme references in it. No, you may not bring it up. There are places for that; noneofthemarehere.

Rules

Generalities

Maintain the spirit of the channel. The spirit is love. And pie. Mmmm, pie.

The ops will always try to make reasonable decisions with the goal of preventing channel from sucking. The reason we're ops is that we've been judged to be good at this, and most of the time we are. If you don't think we're doing it right, private message the op in question to discuss it. If that doesn't work, private message any other op.

Follow the spirit of the rules, not the letter. If you aren't sure if something is okay, ask.

All rules have an implicit "unless it's really funny" after them. If you think it's funny and the rest of channel doesn't, you're wrong.

Bad form

Our collective hate is selective and predictable. Avoid doing any of these things.

Overwriting the whole topic. Prepend instead. If you don't know how to set up topic prepending in your client, ask bucket about "topic editing" (or, in his absence, ask channel).

Borderline spam: for example, triggering bots more than a few times in a row, or rambling for a long time when no one is responding or participating. For the former, use #bots; for the latter, use Livejournal.

Advertising other IRC networks. Naming other networks/channels is totally fine if they happen to come up, but it's obvious when you're just namedropping to try and draw traffic.

Being rude without being funny. You don't have to stay family-friendly or politically correct when just chatting normally or making jokes, but if you're sincerely rude you'll be asked to leave and cool off, shitfag.

Statements which are completely hurtful and have no other value. Offensive jokes are fine; being genuinely offensive is not. This covers all -isms and almost never comes up. For more on this, see Rule #438.

CAPS LOCK IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY IS EVEN WORSE. Shouting does not help prove your point; it only makes you really annoying.

Autorejoin - Set this to 'off.' If you are kicked for a non-joke reason and automatically rejoin the channel, you will very likely line yourself up for a ban to make the kick stick.

Insta-ban

Ban evasion. It's a network rule, and it bears repeating: if you've been banned from a channel, avoiding the ban with proxies, shells, or other 1337 |-|4X, results in a network-wide ban. Simply don't do it, if you have a disagreement with a ban, talk to the op that banned you. If they are unavailable, talk to another op. If you talk to the ops in a reasonable manner, accommodations usually will be made.

Please, if you have nickserv auto-kill any unauthed users of your nick, do not, for the love of all that is good and righteous in the world, set your client to auto-recover your nick. We don't want to have the channel flooded with reconnects, nick changes, then nickserv kills.

Other rules

No discussion of how to forcibly ground planes safely. If you want to use a net to catch an F16, you have to sew it and deploy it yourself. We will not help you.

Denizens

For some reason, members of #xkcd are called denizens. Why? Back in the day, Hermiene used to maintain a list of denizens, and she arbitrarily chose to call it Denizens.